The Patterns of Pablo Cazares

Walking along a dirt road in the woods of New Hampshire, Pablo stoops to pick up the shreds of a paper wasp nest fallen from a nearby tree. He takes off his hat and stuffs it full of the fluttery material, a few oak leaves and acorns still attached. Back at the house, he lays it out next to the rest of his collection of the last few days: acorn caps, strips of decaying bark, and sticks tied together with artificial sinew in the beginning of a sinuous wave formation. These are just the material things. He shows me video recordings of the same stretch of old road filmed from different vantage points: the swirling patterns of pine needles pushed by rain that moves vehicles to the dusty margin; the middle strip of grass that avoids depression; the glinting mica-strewn dirt tire tracks. All move at the same pace in the beginning of a dizzyingly immersive journey through patterns for the viewer.

I first collaborated with Portland-based artist Pablo Cazares in the spring of 2024 when he invited me to be part of a large exhibition, under the auspices of his t4t Art Collective, of trans artists from around the country. I realized I’d already bookmarked an image of his piece Typewriter Loom 1 on Instagram, in which a typewriter, loaded with thread instead of ink ribbon, sits in the middle of a complex web. Although my primary medium is the written word, I was moved by Cazares’s enthusiasm and open-ended call for trans artists working and living at every electrified nerve ending of the gender/genre spectrum. He’d arrived in my inbox with an invitation that had roped in seemingly every interesting trans artist I knew in the city, as well as some I didn’t, for a month of not just exhibitions but also performances, readings, grief workshops, Indigenous-only events, and more. Those who are familiar with the often haphazard and obstacle-filled work of organizing queer and trans artists in any fashion will understand what a feat this was. Cazares did it all with immense humility, generosity, and little administrative oversight, making the Symbiosis Show at Parallax Gallery a true moment of meaning-making and coming together in Portland’s queer art scene.

Since then, I’ve sought out Cazares’s work. I visited his Portland studio, buried in a warren of university buildings, where he grew, stretched, and sewed together kombucha leather and sprouted oats. I took in his 2024 solo show ANONYMIZER at Demonhammer Gallery, in which he used a variety of materials to riff on motifs from the Miseyo Identity Theft Protection Roller and the trippy cybersecurity patterns found inside bank envelopes that “promise protection through invisibility.” His deployment of the uncanny patterns that resemble letters and geological layers of rock, but which ultimately sit just removed enough in their tiled repetition and obfuscatory intent, left me feeling unsettled and energized. Most especially, his Anonymizer Mask now lives in my head rent-free. This medieval-style mask completely obscures the wearer’s face with the identity theft protection pattern cast in nickel using an old technique in which cuttlefish bones are carved and molten metal is poured into the resulting mold. Seeing such a modern pattern with all of its late capitalist valency rendered in such a crude style makes the metal look lustrous, and suddenly specific images leap out from the pattern: a trademark symbol, an incidental swastika, a cent sign threaded through a capital letter A. It feels like a language that might outlast us, the worst of us, crushed together and left to the future’s archeologists to decode for any answers it might reveal about our downfall.

ANONYMIZER could have heralded a movement in Cazares’s work toward more abstraction, more intellectualization of that seam between the digital and the personal, a morass that traps many younger artists these days before they really have a chance to stretch their ideas and their material wings, so to speak. The pull of the screen is now there from birth, and finding ways to escape its symbolic weight is no easy task. But the unifying force in Cazares’s work is pattern — the original technology — the repetition of which can create language, or bodies, or seashells, or oak leaves, or love.

“I want to create wonder without it being mysterious,” Cazares says to me late one night while visiting me on a farm in the woods of New England for a self-directed residency. Whether it’s the tools designed by corporations to protect our identities, or the platforms meant to make connections easier, or the artificial intelligence that conjures images and text seemingly instantly out of thin air, the peril of forgetting how to create wonder is real. Cazares points to the thin layers of paper pulp laid down by the wasps to make their nest, which they do by foraging plant fibers, chewing them up, and then regurgitating in precise strips. Each strip shimmers with a subtle luster in a variety of colors depending on their source material: taupe, brown, silver, gray, or white. Cazares says the pulp strips remind him of the identity theft protection pattern, and they do indeed share an appearance with their overlapping curves and shimmering swirls that offer camouflage and protection from the elements.

The wasps have had a lot more time than humans to figure out how to unite beauty, function, community, and material in their pattern-making. Theirs is the sort of coordinated survival that takes millions of years to emerge; this should provide us with some solace. We might constantly feel like we are at the dismal end of some grand experiment, but really, we’re still beginning. With his analog tools and attention to how pattern lives alongside us if we just choose to tune in, Cazares shows us how to get there, empowering us to create wonder with our own two hands.

The Anonymizer Mask lives on my living room wall now, where Cazares asked if he could store it while he finishes up a Master’s degree in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. I look at it every day, and every day it seems to mean something new, or resist meaning altogether. I think about what patterns Cazares will venture into next, and how they will refract through my life in receding ripples of friendship, art, and connection, and how they will change by having passed through the plain, accessible, nonmysterious wonder factory that is Pablo Cazares.